


far from the things of man

by elliesattlers



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Apocalypse, F/M, Multi, Road Trips, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:40:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22947184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elliesattlers/pseuds/elliesattlers
Summary: Years before, someone gave Josh a card to keep in his wallet and told him who his first call would be.
Relationships: C. J. Cregg/Sam Seaborn/Toby Ziegler, C. J. Cregg/Toby Ziegler
Comments: 4
Kudos: 24





	far from the things of man

  


> Hope never to see Heaven. I have come to lead you to the other shore.  
>  DANTE ALIGHIERI
> 
>   
> 
> 
> You make me shiver, I feel so tender  
>  We make a pretty good team  
>  TALKING HEADS

  
Years before, someone gave Josh a card to keep in his wallet and told him who his first call would be. There would be a bunker, or a helicopter and then a bunker. He turned the card over in his hands twice. 

“My staff...”

The two other men in the office stared through him, their mouths perfectly straight lines. He laughed, awkward, mirthless, strangled air escaping his throat at a joke that wasn’t funny at all. He got it. 

He almost gave the card back, but it slid easily into a pocket behind his Amex and later when C.J. offered him a beer he accepted with a straight-mouthed smile.

:::

  
Although their pages direct them to shelter in place and await further instruction, she arrives at Toby’s carrying a loaf of bread she doesn’t remember taking from her kitchen. He opens the door almost before she can ring the buzzer, like he’s been waiting for her on the other side of it. When he pulls her into the apartment, Sam is already there. 

They lose track of hours waiting for contact of any kind. Sirens sound and then stop. They drink coffee until he switches them to something stronger. At 5am C.J. stands under a lukewarm shower spray because she still might have to give a press briefing as soon as someone calls. She wraps herself in Toby’s flannel bathrobe and sits between them on the living room sofa where they are drinking coffee again. PLEASE STAND BY FOR BROADCAST scrolls across CNN on repeat.

  
Sam swirls brown liquor in a mug. “I was going to run for president.”

He is still freshly returned to them, tan from his months in California and a little hardened by them, too; not a Congressman. C.J. watches the muscles in his forearms flex. Toby is in the bedroom trying Andrea for the thirtieth time.

“He told me I would run so I was gonna run.”

She finishes what’s left of her own drink in a long swallow and stands up unsteadily, her hand on his shoulder for balance more than a gesture of comfort. “Better put on your running shoes.”

  
Toby can’t get to the white house on foot, not that one, the one in Cathedral Heights with the red door. Sam says he wishes he’d stayed in California. C.J. says that if he had he’d be at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean right now and to get in the car.

He contorts himself into the back bench seat of the Mustang. “Nothing makes me feel safe in an unfolding crisis like a vinyl roof on a forty-year-old car.” He taps his fist twice against the closed top of the convertible.

It’s night again and the power in Toby’s neighborhood is out. C.J. locks the doors once they’re all inside even though she knows Sam is right: any kid with a sturdy pocket knife. Her head is bourbon-fuzzy and it takes three tries to fit the key into the ignition. A block ahead, dimming lights on an emergency vehicle flash blue, red, back to blue.

  
They are at a rest stop somewhere in [the great state of] Maryland[!]. There was no house with a red door once they reached Cathedral Heights, and indeed no cathedral, so they’d kept driving. Now, C.J. drags her finger across the curling pages of an atlas she and Toby once used on an earlier road trip, a different lifetime, Sacramento to the Redwoods, ‘88 or ‘89.

Toby and Sam drove north together, too, years ago, following Polaris and Texaco signs to their final destination. They had driven on highways then.

C.J. traces yellowed pages while Toby siphons gas from a sedan with Louisiana plates. “Where’d you learn how to do that?” Sam asks around a mouthful of an off-brand protein bar the texture of cement and not half as tasty. C.J. cuts her eyes at him sharply across the hood of the car and he shuts up, kicks gravel, awaits further instruction.

  
“Remind me what’s the virtue of driving north in November,” Sam complains, trying to pull more of the threadbare comforter around himself. The three of them are side by side by side in the first bed they’ve slept in since Washington. 

C.J. does not answer that it’s because they might find anyone they know at the end of the drive. They won’t. They will drive until they can’t anymore, whether that’s to Teaneck, New Jersey or Newfoundland or the North Pole. 

The bed that uncomfortably fits the three of them is in Duquesne, Pennsylvania, a steel mill town she remembers from the first campaign. They held an under-attended rally there in late August and lost the county by 12 points.

“Shouldn’t we be driving west?” Sam rolls toward C.J. “Manifest destiny?” C.J. rolls toward Toby. Toby rolls toward the wall and pulls one of the bed’s two thin pillows over his head. Under the comforter she presses the cold soles of her feet against his calf just to hear him hiss.

In elementary school, her class took a field trip to a ghost town in central Ohio. 30 ten-year-olds on a school bus, faces pressed against plexiglass to get a safe look at a railway tunnel their teacher told them was haunted and a short line of crumbling buildings. She thinks about that town in the bed in Duquesne, her face an inch away from Toby’s turned back.

She doesn’t think she’s slept, but when she wakes up it is either night or day, Toby is sprawled across the two-seater sofa, and Sam’s arm is slung around her hip.

  
In the parking lot of a looted wholesale store she smokes a cigarette from a pack found stuffed under the seats while they pass a bottle of something awful between them. 

“The thing is. Ritchie was right.” Sam pushes the bottle against Toby’s chest when C.J. won’t take it. “We re-elected him and the world ended.” It isn’t funny, but she makes a sound close to a laugh.

“Semi-ended.” 

“Twilight’s last gleaming.” Sam is drunk. 

She exhales smoke in a straight line. “Hmm.”

Sam takes the bottle back from Toby’s hand where he’s held it without drinking. “To Josh Lyman and whatever he got with his get out of jail free card.”

“Do not pass go, do not collect your closest friends and colleagues and lead them to safety.” Maybe she’s drunk, too.

It stings dully to imagine, even more than the fleeting thought of the alternative. What was it Will said once, not so very long ago. Sam had been there to hear it. There are worse things in the world than no longer being alive. C.J. ashes her cigarette. 

  
They are still, somehow, inexplicably, in Pennsylvania. 

They pass brown fields that might once have yielded green beans, for the President to not eat, or soybeans, to not fuel their car. She thinks about footage of the trees planted in even rows at the Nevada test site, blown over sideways, trunks parallel to the ground before snapping back upright. She thinks about gas masks and the tick-tick-tick of Geiger counters, of needles on a seismograph, needles on a polygraph machine, the tick-tick-tick of the second hand on the watch that she’s still wearing around her thin wrist.

It’s almost time for her morning briefing, though the sky is a dark slate. She takes off the watch and puts it in the glovebox.

  
Toby is writing. She’s seen no evidence of it on actual paper and in fact hasn’t seen a notebook in their travels. But she knows he’s writing because there are ink stains on his fingers, and when they curl inside her she can feel him composing sentences, his forehead pressed against hers, eyes downcast, concentrating hard to line the words up in the right order. 

She stares at his long lashes and bites down on a whine of his name.

They are again, the three of them, on another double mattress, this one somewhere nearing Poughkeepsie. Dime store sheets bunch under her knees. When Sam’s softer hand replaces Toby’s between her legs, she sucks his ink-stained fingers to make him look at her. 

Instead the mattress springs groan as he shifts her between them and pushes her down onto her forearms, where she can’t see his face and his body is over hers in a way that makes her think of the press room, of glass breaking above her head, of asphalt rushing up to meet her and Sam’s hands on her like they are now, or not at all like now.

  
She is standing on the side of the road in her first communion dress, starched fabric stiff beneath her fingertips as she presses her hands down its too-short length. Her mother told her not to let it wrinkle or stain.

The boys are under the hood of the car, which is smoking. Somewhere vaguely south of them there is a militia moving north. They have guns capable of shooting out windows and worse. They have heads on pikes. The hem of her dress is turning grey and she’s scheduled to do the Sunday shows. 

Sam slams down the hood and holds pages aloft in triumph. Tendrils still curl out beneath it, but they’ve finished a draft of a new action-adventure series. He takes her hand and leads her to the passenger seat. Toby is there with a lead apron. The radiation is bad, he tells her, and drapes the weight of it over her lap. She thanks him, she hasn’t felt so comforted in weeks.

We look forward to the life of the world to come, Sam says, slipping something ashen onto her tongue.

Peace be with you, she answers.

  
She used to have a section of her closet devoted to designer gowns. They wore custom-tailored tuxedos, or at least Sam did. Silk ties that her own nimble fingers would straighten and re-straighten.

Now her joints ache and her knuckles are badly in need of moisturizing, nails bitten down like they haven’t been since high school. She studies them while tugging on the buttons of the shirt that hangs too loosely on Toby’s shoulders. 

Her clothes, like his, are ill-fitting; thinning fabric pulled easily from near-translucent skin and dropped onto floorboards. Sam’s tongue drags across the razor slant of her hip bone, a bruise there the size and shape of the pad of Toby’s thumb. There is a sound that she doesn’t at first recognize as coming from her own throat, Sam’s eager mouth on her another thing he wants to get exactly right.

Toby hangs over her back, one hand wrapped around her wrist to brace her palm flat against the wall above them. She closes her eyes against memories of him hovering over Sam at his desk, impatient. His breath is hot in her ear, though she’s forgetting the sound of his voice.

  
Toby drives. Sam rides shotgun. C.J. can almost fully stretch her legs across the backseat. They quietly compose screeds while she directs them from point A to point B. In 40 miles, turn right. Eat this now. Stop drinking that. Touch me here. Close your eyes and go to sleep. Open your eyes and face another 20 hours of whatever this is, which is not altogether so different from the ten and a half months of 1998 they spent sleeping on couches and buses together except now she rinses clothes out in sinks when there’s water, hangs them over curtain rods to half-dry. Unbuttons buttons with formerly nimble fingers and places her body between theirs. 600 miles and however many days behind them, Josh was in an empty lot and then a helicopter and then a bunker. She stops looking at the atlas somewhere in Massachusetts.

  
Across the border into New Hampshire there is a road sign that reads:

WELCOME TO NEW HAMPSHIRE

THE GRANITE STATE

BIENVENUE 

LIVE FREE OR DIE

They park on the banks of the Nashua River, or it could be the Merrimack. The Mustang’s gas meter has been at empty through two days of driving. The river in front of them is black and they have driven until they can’t anymore. The poets have emerged from the cave to look over the hill and see fire, or a shining city, or to once again behold the stars. However it goes. The sky is still all thick cloud cover even in New Hampshire.

“Awasiwi odinak.” She wishes for a bottle of wine to be clutched in her hand.

:::

  
In the kitchen at the farmhouse, she will catalog the contents of a half-ransacked pantry, ignoring bygone expiration dates and separating out only the unrecognizably spoiled. She will line a row of spices on the countertop: cumin, oregano, anise, coriander. She will stop herself from calculating in her mind how many days, weeks, months they can stretch the towers of dry and canned goods in front of her. It is either not enough or too many. 

In a large Dutch oven, she will stir together beans, canned corn and tomatoes. Toby will bring her a glass of something found in the President’s study, and it will burn down the back of her throat while his fingertips trace under the hem of her clean shirt. When she holds a wooden spoon to his lips to taste, he will look her in the eye for the first time since his apartment.

He’ll put the pantry back in order for her while Sam shuffles cards at the kitchen table, dealing her in at the stove. She’ll drop a blue chip into the center of the table while her hand doesn’t even hold a pair. Toby’s knuckles will knock against the wood, check.

They will play hand after hand, pressing chips with no value into each other’s palms. When she ladles bowls of chili for them, they will eat like starved animals. 

Toby will smoke a cigar, he will knock his knuckles against the tabletop, the O of his quiet mouth will make a perfect ring of smoke. She will want to press her own lips there, inhale what he exhales. Instead she’ll slip her bare feet into his lap under the table. They will not be soft or carefully pedicured as they once might have been, but his free hand will rub them gladly. He will look at her with an easy smile and the feeling in her chest could stand an egg on end.

She’ll take over dealing from Sam—queen: no help, six: possible straight—and he’ll repeat old trivia, their de facto president, their heir apparent. In the farmhouse kitchen it will feel just like it once did. Standard punctuation marks, South American geography, sampling data in the census and how many people live in the United States.

Like the joke her brothers used to make when they drove past a cemetery: do you know how many people are dead in there? All of ‘em.


End file.
